Drug Porn is a project born from the research and production of my last feature film ANA. While investigating pro-ana and pro-mia presence on social media and hidden forums, I discovered this whole community of individuals documenting and sharing their drug consumptions and the effect it had on their personal lives. This was going beyond the scope of ANA, the themes but also the required aesthetic treatments, and I decided to keep this for another project.
Since my first contact with that world, media wrote extensively on the subject. Vice covered #tweakernation and #nodsquad, for instance, and academic researches tried to understand the phenomena. The opioid crisis, prescription drugs addiction and the Fentanyl crisis are all part of a recent increase in public awareness.
Tackling such sensible subject matters is never an easy task. Avoiding useless exploitative approaches while letting the brutal reality speaks for itself, using visual techniques to appropriate the material for a purpose but not making it about the aesthetic, etc. I decided to accumulate as much archive as possible (videos, images but also texts) and let the information saturation guide the path. The process is more instinctual than intellectual.
For the last year and a half, I’ve amassed over 45 hours of material, over 2 700 minutes. Since last Fall, I’ve worked on the offline editing and reached a workable 166 minutes. The structure, flow and editing choices have been made. Drug Porn was a working title at the beginning, but it says what it is. Sometimes, it is pornography in the strictest sense. Sometimes, it reflects literally the third definition of the word by the Merriam-Webster dictionary: “the depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction”. What is the reason and purposes of this social media staging? Documentation? Having witnesses ? Allow people to live through them vicariously? Eroticism? There are as much reasons as there are persons, and they are all valid. The total noise it creates is absolutely valid and should be communicated as such.
The project final form is still to be defined and will be decided when the final cut will be finished. Drug Porn should be completed this Fall.
“Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,” but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster.
-PKD, A Scanner Darkly
Tout plaisir inassouvi est une occasion perdue pour la vie. Ce n’est pas moi qui viendrais brandir la souffrance pour interdire au monde les orgies et les excès. Laissons les médiocres parler des conséquences des plaisirs : celles de la douleur ne sont-elles pas plus sérieuses encore? Seul un médiocre souhaitera, pour mourir, atteindre le stade de la vieillesse. Souffrez donc, enivrez-vous, buvez la coupe du plaisir jusqu’à la lie, pleurez ou riez, poussez des cries de joie ou de désespoir – il n’en restera rien de toute manière. Toute la morale n’a d’autre but que de transformer cette vie en une somme d’occasions perdues.
-Cioran, Sur les cimes du désespoir
